Electronic Consciousness?
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Exactly my point.. how can you tell a broken computer, from a conscious one that thinks so differently, that its completely unaware of you?
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
It wouldn't think differently if done correctly, that's the point, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference if you didn't already know it was a machine. For instance, the Turing Test. Also if we can build machines that replicate human consciousness, those machines would also be vulnerable to human neuroses. Hence HAL. Hence broken. Throwing an exception could get a lot more dangerous. For the record, I don't think that it will ever be possible to do this, and in any case it's currently nothing more than a fantasy given the current state of technology and our knowledge of the mind. But the attempt can teach us much about ourselves, I think.
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I am curious from the point of view of people from a programming sort of environment, how many of us believe that it will be possible to store a consciousness electronically. This could be either to store an existing conciousness (as in copying or backing up an existing mind electronically) or to develop a completely new conciousness that never existed biologically. I'm trying to stay away from the far reaching philosophical and moralistic implications of doing either of these things. That's a massive can of worms. I just wondered how many coders actually think it will ever be possible and how many think it is something that could never be achieved. I think it will be possible.
I definitely think is will be possible (if humans don't destroy themselves 1st or otherwise lose all the gains they've accomplished over the past millenia). I do, however, think we will achieve this in a manner not currently considered. Since I'm a firm believer that every living thing is linked to the cosmic conscientious, all that is really required is a "port" to my thread and voila, done! String theory may get us there...
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Yes you do or you would not be incapable of responding meaning fully with any one else and thus you are not alive.
I'm not sure how well that argument would stand up in a hospital. ;)
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I see no reason why it wouldn't be possible. After all, the human brain is nothing but a big processor that obeys the laws of physics. Man-made systems with similar capabilities of cognition, affectivity, introspection... should be able to support consciousness. Wikipedia supplies interesting material on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading[^]). Moving consciousness from one being to another is something we (I) don't understand at the moment, and it seems to raise paradoxical situations.
Interesting reading. It seems that a fruit fly and a mouse have already been digitized so we are not far off. :-D I wonder what you would call a bug in the code of a bug? I don't think humans need to understand something before they copy it and the process of copying may give us better understanding.
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Hi, There is no doubt that consciousness can be implemented in 'artificial' mediums. There is nothing 'magical' about living matter - and 'natural' consciousness is just the result of an (as of yet not understood) process implemented in matter. When we understand that process, we will be able to implement it in an appropriate artificial/non-living medium. And it is, almost beyond doubt, a computational process - and I personally believe that consciousness can even be implemented in current-generation hardware and software. We just need to understand it first! Marius Myburg. http://mariusmyburg.wordpress.com/
I agree except for the understanding bit. It would be helpful but not essential I think.
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Well, for some folks that I know it should be fairly easy to save their consciousness on a old-time 180K single-sided floppy disk, even together with some interresting data. For most others I would say "No-way, José!" You may store a snapshot of all the neuronic activities for >clik< THIS moment, but we are really not sure whether that is enough - what about the chemical state, how about the framework (I understand that the brains are wired differently from person to person) and so on. And then there are the ethical / spiritual / practical problems... Much easier to rely on a divine intervention! :wtf: :wtf:
Ill dig out my 64mb memory stick out we can keep them all together so they don't get lonely.
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Yes, it will be possible IMO. This is how it can be done: It will not be a scan, or a download, it will be slow. Every cell in your brain can be replaced by a synthetic. Your consciousness is not in one cell, but is made up of a collection of all of your cells. Switching each one individual will allow your consciousness to switch over to electronics, at what point does that occur? It's not binary- at what spoonful of soil does a hill become a mountain? After the transition is complete, the body and be destroyed and electric brain removed.
I love a good paradox! If you pull the hairs out of your head 1 at a time, at which point do you become bald?
wizardzz wrote:
After the transition is complete, the body and be destroyed and electric brain removed.
that's definitely not the most romantic way of doing it. It sounds a bit like peeling an orange! I'd not considered a gradual assimilation though.
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Don't. Build. Cylons.
As long as we get to choose our own coloured light I don't mind.
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The question is premature, at least for Western science, as it hasn't even been figured out yet. Though an advanced Buddhist meditator who has studied the Abhidharma(Google it) might have some intersting ideas to relate. So how could you save it if you don't have a clue what it is? Mike
I admit that I only skim read about the Abhidarma. I got sidetracked as it made me imagine digitizing our brains in order to ascend.
AAC Mike wrote:
So how could you save it if you don't have a clue what it is?
I do that with my code sometimes.
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The very detailed book "Astral Dynamics" by Robert Bruce provides first hand accounts of different types of consciousness in our different levels of bodies, saying that the physical body brain does indeed have a type of consciousness, even though it appears to be mortal and not the eternal consciousness of the soul. My own experience tends to agree with this. So, theoretically, I would say a qualified yes, to a degree.
I'm not sure why, but that reminded me that praying mantis have two brains. I don't know if that's relevant or I'm just getting tired.
Bruce Patin wrote:
My own experience tends to agree with this.
That sounds interesting. Have you had a near death or outer body experience?
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If we consider the brain as simple computing device, then the answer is yes, but first we must understand what defines a consciousness, the minimum detail level we need to emulate so it works and the appropriate platform to emulate it. Having said that, I believe that the time for everyone of us wearing and "Intel Inside" badge in our skulls, is a bit far away. ;P
CEO at: - Rafaga Systems - Para Facturas - Modern Components for the moment...
AMD then? I couldn't resist. :)
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Lee Chetwynd wrote:
it will be possible to store a consciousness electronically
Reading out the data and storing the structure of a brain is simply an engineering problem, probably not possible today, but within our grasp should we want to develop the technology. Whether that translates to storing a consciousness is unknown. The difficult part comes in what ways you expect it can be used. Emulating it electronically, a la Heechee, we're still a ways away from that. Using it as a backup implies that you can restore it. We're a long, long ways away from being able to restore the saved data. As for developing a new consciousness, well, saving, executing and restoring a consciousness probably isn't terribly relevant to developing one. Will we develop an artificial consciousness? I think we're starting to approach it in the right ways, but I'm not sure we'll recognize when we succeed. Personally, I'm beginning to suspect we've already succeeded.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
patbob wrote:
Will we develop an artificial consciousness? I think we're starting to approach it in the right ways, but I'm not sure we'll recognize when we succeed. Personally, I'm beginning to suspect we've already succeeded.
Do you mean the internet? Apparently it looks a bit like the cover of the last Muse album. Or do you mean something else? Are we living inside a big simulation?
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I think that cannot be reproduced electronically something that is biologically or chemically done.
But we can use bacteria to store data and cells from a leech to process data. They are both examples of digital to biological. Why could we not do the reverse. Biological to digital.
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But Troy you are working on an assumption that you know what consciousness is. You don't. Remember the story of the blind men and the elephant. Each had a different perception depending on which part of the elephant they were touching. Try reading some early 20th or even 19th thoughts on science and see how each generation is so presumptious about what it thinks it knows. We have a very, very long way to go. I think 1000 years from now might we might be a little closer. Lay people often ask me about things like artificial intelligence and I tell them the key word is "artificial" NOT intelligence.
I don't see anything in my post that appears to make that assumption. In fact, my supposition is that we do need to learn more about the mechanics of non-deterministic computation in order to achieve either goal. How does my post demonstrate an assumption that I know what consciousness is?
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I am curious from the point of view of people from a programming sort of environment, how many of us believe that it will be possible to store a consciousness electronically. This could be either to store an existing conciousness (as in copying or backing up an existing mind electronically) or to develop a completely new conciousness that never existed biologically. I'm trying to stay away from the far reaching philosophical and moralistic implications of doing either of these things. That's a massive can of worms. I just wondered how many coders actually think it will ever be possible and how many think it is something that could never be achieved. I think it will be possible.
Lee Chetwynd wrote:
I am curious from the point of view of people from a programming sort of environment, how many of us believe that it will be possible to store a consciousness electronically.
Sometimes I wonder if we haven't inadvertently already achieved this. I've had bugs in code, I have absolutely gone over it line by line and swear there is nothing wrong with the logic. It is way too computationally intense to step through line by line, So I add code to find the first point it goes south and print statements to file to identify where it is happening. Poof, bug disappears. I've had that happen in the past, but it was fixed by altering the memory processing and removing the logic, the bug reappears. Those are REALLY difficult to find. Great, first time I've run into that on a windows environment. (When I did before, it last was FORTRAN on IBM mainframe.) I remove bug trace logic, expect the bug to reappear, it doesn't. That, I call a ghost in the shell moment. I had printed out my code in an attempt to coolly and calmly review what I had written before putting in the write statements, so I print the version that is currently working. Line, by line, everything lines up, no visible extra characters added or dropped, but now code works perfectly. They say the devil is in the details, I say the devil is in the machine just waiting to pounce. :-D
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patbob wrote:
Will we develop an artificial consciousness? I think we're starting to approach it in the right ways, but I'm not sure we'll recognize when we succeed. Personally, I'm beginning to suspect we've already succeeded.
Do you mean the internet? Apparently it looks a bit like the cover of the last Muse album. Or do you mean something else? Are we living inside a big simulation?
Not so much the structure of the internet, but more the complexity of the software that interacts across it. We've got millions of little computers, all network connected, all doing a little processing, and all passing data to other computers. We think it's producing deterministic results given a set of inputs, but the exact same can be said of your neurons too. If your consciousness can be a gestalt of the signals between your neurons, why can't a higher level one be a gestalt of our smart phones and PCs?
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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Will we be able to create an artificial consciousness sufficiently similar to our own that we would recognize it as conscious? Absolutely. Probably within a human lifetime. Self-awareness isn't as hard as people make it out to be. Consciousness is mostly a data storage and retrieval problem, I think. Will we be able to download a human consciousness and run it on a computer? Probably not feasible. The human brain stores its memories in the wiring of the entire brain. You'd have to be able to read out all the neural synapses. Can you do that without carefully dissassembling a brain? I rather doubt it. Synaptic function is more than connectivity. The strength of signalling of any neuron is a function of the precise functioning of the neuron's internal machinery. You may expect this machinery to be as variable as human appearance. Think of all the many kinds of behavioral health issues people may display, all the kinds of genius and developmental disability, and you get some idea of how variable this function is. Even if we could wave a magic wand and make the problem of downloading the synapses go away, the brain is not a single organ, but rather hundreds of related, specialized processors. DNA stores only an approximate map of these processors, they are self-assembling during development, and no two are alike. Making these specialized processors run efficiently on a general-purpose computer is unlikely. You'll have to simulate them at a very low level to get high fidelity. And in the end, how valuable would this be, even if we could do it? Few people are going to be excited about having their consciousness downloaded if the process is destructive, because the consciousness in your body would then very definitely die, with only the promise that a very similar one would be created. Like life insurance, this bet doesn't benefit your original consciousness. If the process was not destructive, then the result would be that there are two "yous", each wanting to live, each wanting to control the assets "you" own, each rapidly diverging into different identities as their experiences differed. You forgot to ask the "upload" question. Could you upload your copied consciousness into other brains? Again, given the variability of brains, you'd need a way to exactly recreate your original brain in order for the consciousness "program" to run reliably. Sorry, the human brain is the ultimate intellectual property. Its design completely frustrates copying and duplication. DRM is designed in, intelligently or not.
SeattleC++ wrote:
then the result would be that there are two "yous", each wanting to live, each wanting to control the assets "you" own, each rapidly diverging into different identities as their experiences differed.
I have thought about this bit a lot. I think you are right with rapid. I think we change with every microsecond of experience. Two identical consciousness would remain identical for only the smallest measurement of time if at all. Uploading would be interesting. Perhaps instead of the death sentence you could have your mind overwritten. That probably amounts to the same thing. The film 'freejack' just popped up from a small dark corner at the back of my mind. Are you saying that physical variances in the development of each individual neuron, play a part inthe definition of who we are? Kind of like, Ill attempt an analogy of what I think you said: its not just about if the switch is in an on or off position but also the physical dimensions of the switch, what brand it is, which shop you got it from and how much you paid for it and who made it and whether or not they are happy in their job and remembered to feed the dog before they left for work that morning.
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I think it will be possible, but it's going to take a better understanding of the quantum state of neurons to implement. There is evidence that neurons operate using electrons in a hyperpositional state, meaning that it is entirely possible what we think of as information in the brain only exists as it interacts with the world. Even developing a non-biological conciousness, at least as we currently understand what that means, will likely require some form of non-deterministic computation. In the nearer term, developing more and more sophisticated simulations that can, ultimately, fool the user/observer into thinking that they are conscious is a much more straightforward goal.
Perhaps we are just fooling ourselves. Maybe consciousness is something that doesn't really exist and we just think we are.
Troy.Thompson wrote:
There is evidence that neurons operate using electrons in a hyperpositional state, meaning that it is entirely possible what we think of as information in the brain only exists as it interacts with the world.
That is an interesting idea. In my head it combines not being able to measure both the position and speed of an electron, with Descartes 'I think therefore I am' .
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This idea is central to the later books in The Heechee Saga[^] by Frederik Pohl, a series of science fiction novels. The Heechee, an alien race, store their consciousness in a device when they are near death. Family members carry the devices with them, and the stored intelligences are an integral part of their culture. Humans adapt the technology for themselves. The main human character through the series eventually becomes 'vastened' himself.
Software Zen:
delete this;See also pretty much everything by Greg Egan. Love his books. Myself... I'm not sure.
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I am curious from the point of view of people from a programming sort of environment, how many of us believe that it will be possible to store a consciousness electronically. This could be either to store an existing conciousness (as in copying or backing up an existing mind electronically) or to develop a completely new conciousness that never existed biologically. I'm trying to stay away from the far reaching philosophical and moralistic implications of doing either of these things. That's a massive can of worms. I just wondered how many coders actually think it will ever be possible and how many think it is something that could never be achieved. I think it will be possible.
First thing I thought of was the the Turing machine. Looked it up, has nothing to do with consciousness. I do remember talk of using a Turing machine on one end and a teletype on the other and if you couldn't tell if what is responding to you is a person or machine, then you've achieved consciousness. I couldn't find a link to that, so I may be totally wrong. Big blue has a machine that can go on game shows and do very well indeed. It, in no way, indicates it is a person so we aren't there yet, but that would have been impossible to do 20 years ago. If you know or can find that description, I'd like to see how they defined consciousness.